Spain Extends Rights to “Our Evolutionary Comrades”

The Spanish parliament is clamoring to extend “rights” such as the “right to life, freedom and not to be tortured” to great apes (Roberts, 2008). New resolutions, that will most likely become law in a year, will make it illegal to keep apes for circuses, television commercials, or movies. These new regulations mark “the first time any national legislature has called for such rights for non-humans” (2008).

What impetus is behind this legislation? The Great Apes Project founded by Peter Singer and Paola Cavelieri, has been “devised by scientists and philosophers who say our closest genetic relatives deserve rights hitherto limited to humans” (2008). Pedro Pazas, the Spanish director of the Great Apes Project, gleefully exclaimed: “This is a historic day in the struggle for animal rights and in defense of our evolutionary comrades, which will doubtless go down in the history of humanity” (as quoted in Roberts, 2008, emp. added).

Foregoing an exhaustive refutation of the false theory of evolution (which we have done elsewhere; see Thompson, 2004), what will be the consequences of viewing humans and animals as “evolutionary comrades”? In his book Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism, self-proclaimed Darwinian James Rachels stated that when the true moral implications of evolution are understood,

human life will no longer be regarded with the kind of superstitious awe which it is accorded in traditional thought, and the lives of non-humans will no longer be a matter of indifference. This means that human life will, in a sense, be devalued, while the value granted to non-human life will be increased. A revised view of such matters as suicide and euthanasia, as well as a revised view of how we should treat animals, will result (p. 5, emp. added).

Where will the devaluation of human life and the elevation of animal life eventually lead? Rachels shed a sickening light on that question when he concluded:

Some unfortunate humans—perhaps because they have suffered brain damage—are not rational agents. What are we to say about them? The natural conclusion, according to the doctrine we are considering, would be that their status is that of mere animals. And perhaps we should go on to conclude that they may be used as non-human animals are used—perhaps as laboratory subjects, or as food (1990, p. 186, emp. added).

Once the biblical view that man is created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27) is replaced by the false notion that animals are our evolutionary comrades and deserve the same rights as human, the door will be wide open to the basest moral atrocities. In truth, it is a small step from granting apes human rights, to mincing up brain-damaged humans for dog food—a fact that evolutionary “ethicists” well recognize.

REFERENCES

Rachels, James (1990), Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (New York: Oxford University Press).

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